Harold Tessendorf
Tessendorf Consulting
Certified Aligned Influence Consultant
This article is based on the experiences and observations the author has made as an Aligned Influence consultant and practitioner while leading, training, and coaching Boards and Chief Executives over the past decade.
Introduction
The Aligned Influence model functions as a synchronized governance operating system where the board sets the organization’s direction, protects the organization’s integrity by setting boundaries for the Chief Executive’s actions, and enables the work of the organization by leveraging its members’ external influence and resources. This allows the organization’s chief executive to lead and manage the organization so that their team can accomplish their plans in support of the direction that the board has established.
This iterative process of alignment is achieved through a four-stage intervention:
- Check Alignment: An initial assessment to understand the current state of those leaders entrusted to govern the organization and the degree to which they are aligned and effective in their roles.
- Get Aligned: A “mountaintop experience” where the organization’s entire governance system gathers in one room to learn a new and shared conceptual framework and language and are exposed to the tools that will make their practical alignment a reality.
- Stay Aligned: This is when the Board and Executive team build the discipline and systems needed to institutionalize their new governance rhythm. This involves regular, structured reviews to ensure the organization remains on track and continues to refine its direction statement.
- Drive Effectiveness: With an eye to the organization’s future, this stage involves building the bench of those who will follow the current generation of Board members and officers as well as the Chief Executive and their team.
If Get Aligned represents the mountaintop experience where the direction is first made clear, then Stay Aligned is what happens when the leadership team returns to the valley to tend to the soil so that these new governance seeds can take root. It is here that the rewarding work begins as an organization moves from static theory and rules-based policy into a living partnership between the Board of Directors and the Executive Team.
The Seeds and the Soil: In an effective organization, we can view its dynamic governance system through the lens of a germinating plant.
- The Seed refers to the structural operating systems, conceptual frameworks, and tools provided during the Get Aligned stage. It contains all the potential for greatness but remains dormant without nourishment and action.
- The Soil refers to the enabling organizational culture and the discipline of the people required to provide nutrients for the seed to break the surface. This involves strengthening the roles and positions that are central to good governance with their current incumbents using the discipline from applying the shared governance tools to guide their actions and ensure accountability.
Nurturing this growth is a patient process that requires several seasons to be truly institutionalized. This means that organizations must invest over several years so that their Stay Aligned work results in deep roots taking hold to anchor the organization. It has been our experience that when Boards and Chief Executives attempt to shortcut this stage, they are like gardeners who stop watering before the roots have taken hold – risking a withered return to old, ineffective governance practices.
Building Systems to Maintain Relational Trust: The Aligned Influence model is premised on the proven belief that good governance is built on aligned systems rather than just the personalities of high-performing individuals. This is achieved when the Board and Executive team use the governance tools listed above under the “seed” above to the organization and its culture healthy through actions that include:
- Pre-meeting Coaching: Planning calls between the Board President and Chief Executive to reflect on lessons learnt from the last meeting while also preparing for upcoming ones as well as emerging challenges. On a recent coaching call, the Board President of one of our clients told me that “… these monthly checkups provide us with a backstop that keeps us accountable and on task…”
- Continuous Evaluation: Creating agendas that allow for strategic discussion and mutual accountability of both the Board and the Chief Executive. This regular cadence moves board meetings away from being stressful annual reviews towards ones that are structured and that include ongoing feedback loops.
- Reinforcing the Governance Operating System: Structuring and charging the committees that comprise only Board members and that support the Board to execute its roles effectively. This requires that the organization’s bylaws be reviewed regularly and that new board members are carefully selected, oriented, and trained.
- Stakeholder Engagement: This involves the Board engaging with community leaders and members to ensure the organization’s direction and values remain relevant so that the organization remains “too essential to fail”. (The topic of Stakeholder Engagement will be explored in greater detail in a subsequent post).
Unlearning and Relearning for Growth
Just as a field must be cleared of weeds before new crops can thrive, Stay Aligned requires organizations to unlearn old governance behaviors and intentionally replace them with new, more productive ones.
- Phase 1: Clearing the Ground: This phase involves preparing the soil by identifying and uprooting old practices. It requires a conscious effort to stop Executives from stepping into “Board territory” to do the Board’s work while also clearing away “working board” mentalities that choke out strategic discussion and growth. When working with our clients, we refer to the insights from the earlier Check Alignment phase and Get Aligned workshop to prepare the Board and Executive Team to use the tools we shared and customized after the Get Aligned workshop.
- Phase 2: The Germination Stage: This is the transition period where the organization’s leaders put the building blocks of shared language and tools into practice to create a new governance rhythm. As the first stems emerge from the soil, we have seen that the Executive learns to “speak less” about the past and present by instead providing succinct, timely, and transparent reports about key metrics, while the Board begins to speak more about strategy and the organization’s future.
- Phase 3: Deepening the Roots: In this final stage, the new behavior becomes deeply rooted to ensure the organization does not wash away during a storm and return to old habits. This is achieved by using governance tools such as agendas and functioning board and staff committees to strengthen the governance operating system. Success is built on these sound systems – a hardy root system – rather than just the personalities of its current Board officers and its Chief Executive.
A New Governing Role – The Board member as Enabler rather than Mere Overseer: What truly distinguishes an organization that has embraced Aligned Influence from those that follow traditional models of governance is that the former embraces the Enable role. While the Chief Executive is tasked to “Lead, Manage, and Accomplish,” the Board stays aligned by actively pulling their weight through advocacy. Board members do so by leveraging their professional reputations and networks of influence to secure funding, partnerships, and political capital for the organization. They also ensure that as the organization scales up its activities to deliver greater impact, that their own enabling activities scale proportionally to support those goals being accomplished.
Conclusion
In this article, we saw how the seed of the new governance operating is laid during the Get Aligned stage. Its move from dormancy to full fruition is what Stay Aligned is all about. We visualized how the germinating stem is the strengthening alignment between the Board Chair/President and the organization’s Chief Executive. We read that the different parts of the governance operating system must remain aligned to ensure that the organization’s effectiveness survives the current generation of board members and key staff. When these parts are aligned, then the organization – the perennial flower – can “bloom” year after year, delivering life-changing impact to those it serves and the communities where it functions.
To succeed over the long-term, organizations’ leaders must nurture an iterative governance operating system that builds alignment between the Board and Executive Team and then uses this as the foundation to drive organizational effectiveness.
Contact the governance coaches today to learn more about how they can help your organization to transform its governance system.
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